Introduction

You know how to be productive at work. In fact, you might have mastered David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Here we use GTD to guide us on how to play, to pursue life outside of work, life inside your work, inject vitality and maybe even surprises.

Think of this as a major plugin to GTD. If you're an emac user, playflow would be a big as org-mode.

Why

You may have gotten so good at getting work done you forgot how to play. For something that should occupy at least a third of your life (work, sleep, play), there's no established structure on how to go about playing.

It may even be fair to say there's no heuristic we can or should take seriously on how to play. What do we have: "work hard play hard", YOLO, that's all I can come up with. None of them inform you how the other third of your day should be done. We're simply running on "it's off work-hour now, just do what you enjoy." We can do better.

Meantime, I was reminded about the someday list in GTD (things you're not doing now and won't be doing next). Given a long enough list, items in there are more interesting and far more telling about where you psyche wants to lead you to.

For an in-depth look at the context, read the rationale behind how playflow the idea was conjured.

This framework is a direct acceptance of that challenge.

Philosophy

Let's use GTD as the workflow system as reference.

A brief recap first. GTD's fundamental idea is to unload things in your head onto a system that acts as your second brain, such that you get to focus on one task at a time without worrying about slipping up.

A playflow system does the opposite. It serves to load play-items onto the brain and synthesize until they cohere, with no expectation of outcome and possibly indeterministic results.

If getting work done is a finite game; playing is an infinite game. If playflow lives up to that, then it follows that playflow may encapsulte workflows, just an infinite game can contain finite games.

A playflow loop never closes, it has no end-state. A play-item done won't be taken off but rearranged somewhere else in the list.

We don't know if we're done with a play, because there's no done other than a vague sense of satisfaction. I know this makes Done in GTD a misnomer; well too bad.

The driving theme behind picking what to play, when to play it and how long to play for is this:

Energy

Energy here has more in common with qi than joule. It's about vitality not raw power.

It's tempting to think we wanna do things that give us energy, avoid things that take away energy. But energy-consuming activities are often what's meaningful; and energy-giving items are usually sources of excessive fat.

We wanna play in such a way that the energy level by the end of the session is at the right level for next thing we wanna do.

If you have a critical mission in the next hour, you should play something that's energy-restoring, maybe goof off on YouTube.

If you're gonna have a meal that recharges you next, you should play something energy-consuming until it tires you out.

We're not trying to maximize energy. We're trying to maximize meaning.

Think of your plays as serving your energy, rather than energy being the currency to conserve for plays.

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